Ballets Russes, Sadlers Wells Ballet

Ninette de Valois, Kenneth MacMillan, George Balanchine

  I'VE INTERVIEWED  

★ Carlos Acosta  ★ Alicia Alonso  ★ Richard Alston  ★ Nina Ananiashvili  ★ Altynai Asylmuratova  ★ The Ballet Boyz  ★ Mikhail Baryshnikov  ★ Yuri Bashmet  ★ Pina Bausch  ★ Maurice Béjart  ★ Leanne Benjamin  ★ David Bintley  ★ Matthew Bourne  ★ Kim Brandstrup  ★ Buster Brown  ★ Trisha Brown  ★ Christopher Bruce  ★ Jonathan Burrows  ★ Darcey Bussell  ★ Lucinda Childs  ★ Michael Clark  ★ Alina Cojocaru  ★ Lesley Collier  ★ Adam Cooper  ★ Keith Cooper  ★ Joaquin Cortes  ★ Clement Crisp  ★ Merce Cunningham  ★ Siobhan Davies  ★ Derek Deane  ★ Lucas Debargue  ★ Tory Dobrin  ★ Anthony Dowell  ★ John Drummond  ★ Viviana Durante  ★ Boris Eifman  ★ Mats Ek  ★ Suzanne Farrell  ★ Michael Flatley  ★ William Forsythe  ★ Javier de Frutos  ★ Antonio Gades  ★ Nicholas Georgiadis  ★ Valery Gergiev  ★ Angela Gheorghiu  ★ Yuri Grigorovich  ★ Sylvie Guillem  ★ Evelyn Hart  ★ Mona Inglesby  ★ Zizi Jeanmaire  ★ Akram Khan  ★ Johan Kobborg  ★ Alfredo Kraus  ★ Pierre Lacotte  ★ Brigitte Lefèvre  ★ Uliana Lopatkina  ★ Wayne McGregor  ★ Deborah MacMillan  ★ Natalia Makarova  ★ Russell Maliphant  ★ Alicia Markova  ★ Peter Martins  ★ Ekaterina Maximova  ★ Misha Messerer  ★ Mark Morris  ★ Irek Mukhamedov  ★ Lloyd Newson  ★ Rudolf Nureyev  ★ Henri Oguike  ★ Natalia Osipova  ★ Murray Perahia  ★ Maya Plisetskaya  ★ Sergei Polunin  ★ Angelin Preljocaj  ★ Ron Protas  ★ Yvonne Rainer  ★ Alexei Ratmansky  ★ Tamara Rojo  ★ Mstislav Rostropovich  ★ Gerald Scarfe  ★ Peter Schaufuss  ★ Lynn Seymour  ★ Rodion Shchedrin  ★ Wayne Sleep  ★ Alina Somova  ★ Yolande Sonnabend  ★ Glen Tetley  ★ Twyla Tharp  ★ Ninette de Valois  ★ Ivan Vasiliev   ★ Vladimir Vasiliev  ★ Oleg Vinogradov  ★ Edward Watson  ★ Christopher Wheeldon  ★ Sarah Wildor  ★ Peter Wright  ★ Eva Yerbabuena  ★ Igor Zelensky ★

  OBITUARIES INCLUDE  

★ Yuri Grigorovich ★ Pierre Lacotte ★  Lynn Seymour ★ Clement Crisp ★ Alicia Alonso ★ Violetta Elvin ★ Antonio Gades ★ Gillian Lynne ★ Alicia Markova ★ Paul Taylor ★  Julia Farron ★

dance critic

ballet critic

dance writing

modern ballet

contemporary dance

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dance history archive

Royal Ballet

Rudolf Nureyev

Sylvie Guillem

Mikhail Baryshnikov

  THIS SITE  

is a filing cabinet of several hundred reviews, interviews, news articles and commentaries recording the dance scene from the 1990s to the 2020s, observed by me as the dance and ballet critic of the Daily Telegraph, The Arts Desk and The Spectator, and as the Telegraph's dance obituarist.

     In my selection I have tried to prioritise splendid entertainments over the abundance of tedium and fidgets (see my favourite-ever quote about dance, from Merce Cunningham, in this site's masthead). You can find here interviews with major performers and creators, reports and commentaries on arts issues, and reviews and previews of shows that seemed significant above the usual run (including premieres of some now-famous events). There is also a continuing tide of obituaries. The vagaries of newspaper digitisation and my own inconsistency in keeping cuttings means there are holes in the history-building function of this site. Still, the pieces here are all now freely readable, as pdfs from still available online links or imperfect photos of print cuttings as found (though originally published visuals might be lost).

     The dance waterfront that I covered was loosely defined around the great dancers Sylvie Guillem, Uliana Lopatkina, Irek Mukhamedov, Tamara Rojo, Johan Kobborg, Carlos Acosta and the young Alina Cojocaru, and the repeatedly interesting choreographer generation of Akram Khan, Jonathan Burrows, Wayne McGregor, Russell Maliphant, Javier de Frutos and Matthew Bourne, who emerged as distinctive new gamechangers in a landscape already richly characterised by the Ashton-MacMillan and London Contemporary Dance Theatre eras.

     In art-historical context, this was an increasingly reactionary era, signposted by deaths of giants – Fonteyn, MacMillan, Nureyev, de Valois, Cunningham, Bausch – and by the march of commercial globalism and co-production. Creative work was affected by an insistence on box office performance, by institutional and identity politics, by a muddled drive to remotivate dance art with social and educational priorities, and by fatal uncertainty about dance's inherited styles, manners and works. Support gradually fell off for the flavoursome and ambitious individuals who for a fascinating time drew audiences to many theatres around the country, and Britain's standing as a primary host for major foreign modernists was weakened by the feedback loop of rising costs and undernourished public interest.

     Still, even if many threads of performing history were stretching thin or snapping, the sheer volume and geographical spread of my coverage reflects the Telegraph's real interest in including nationwide performing arts as part of its reader offering in that period, and how detailed, independent-minded arts coverage was part of the identity of broadsheet newspapers. My cuttings indicate the blizzard of variety in dance-going up and down Britain – classical, neo-classical and contemporary ballet, modern dance, physical theatre, dance theatre, flamenco, hip hop, mime, folk dance, circus, jazz, cabaret, installation dance, video and digital work – with all their merging and mixing reflecting and prodding increasingly eclectic training systems, artistic experiments, cultural tastes and employment realities, all injecting fresh vim into the traditional rows about standards in art, and new (subsequently seismic) rows about how to use words.

     Like Cunningham, Mark Morris has the right words, deceptively simple: "I make up dances, you watch them." For an hour or two upon the stage, performances are important wayposts in their creators' and audience's lives, and even if the show will be seen no more, the eyes on it have generated a fragment of historical evidence, to be revisited, maybe, one day. History isn't just about preserving the past, it's about providing for the present. I hope you find something here to trigger a happy memory, argument or curiosity. If you want to republish or extract something, do email me.

Tamara Rojo

Alina Cojocaru

Uliana Lopatkina

Bolshoi Ballet

Russian ballet

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ballet legends

Akram Khan

Matthew Bourne

Carlos Acosta

Wayne McGregor

  ABOUT ME  

I am a dance critic, arts journalist and, more recently, historian, with a musical background. I was the Daily Telegraph's dance critic for 15 years (1993-2008) and their dance obituarist to date, and later The Spectator’s dance critic for two years (2014-16).     

     In 2009 I designed, launched and site-managed the award-winning critics’ site The Arts Desk (named Best Specialist Journalism Site in the 2012 Online Media Awards), spending three years as a founding director and its dance editor, and I still write occasionally for it.

        My broadcasting includes many years covering dance for BBC Radio 2's long-running Friday night arts show with Sheridan Morley and for LBC's Big City. I presented a Radio 4 documentary on Mona Inglesby's International Ballet, and have presented events for New Adventures, English National Ballet, Sadler's Wells, the London Symphony Orchestra, The Place, and other arts companies. My YouTube channel, @balletlegendsinterviewed, shows my in-depth interview films with stars of ballet and dance, so far Adam Cooper, Nina Ananiashvili, Sarah Wildor, Matz Skoog and Tory Dobrin.

     I trained as a pianist, singer and violist at the Royal College of Music, London, where I was inspired by visiting Russian musicians. Much later, after developing a wider interest in Soviet culture as a result of my ballet journalism, I taught myself Russian and in 2015 I gained an MA in Russian Studies at University College, London's School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

     In 2021 I gained my doctorate at the University of Oxford for my thesis on the Soviet politician and USSR Culture Minister Ekaterina Furtseva, on whom I have published peer-reviewed scholarship and continue to work. For more on this, see my Historian page.

dance reviews

ballet interviews

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